Cambridge Dictionary reveals its official word of the year

Do you know what the new word of the year means?

Just like the humans they could be destined to wipe out, ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools don’t always tell the truth when they ‘hallucinate’.

Now, hallucinate has been named the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year after AI became notorious for telling lies, making up false facts and spreading misinformation. 

ChatGPT, Bard and Grok are capable of generating prose that can be a convincing – if rather stiff – impersonation of human writing. These tools are called large language models and are ‘trained’ to write by crunching through vast amounts of written information. 

However, they are also known to ‘hallucinate’ and churn out false information with no basis in reality. 

The traditional definition of ‘hallucinate’ is ‘to seem to see, hear, feel, or smell something that does not exist, usually because of a health condition or because you have taken a drug’, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. 

However, following the rise of the chatbots, an additional definition has now been added to the Dictionary which states: ‘When an artificial intelligence (a computer system that has some of the qualities that the human brain has, such as the ability to produce language in a way that seems human) hallucinates, it produces false information.’

ChatGPT is now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world (Picture: Reuters)

Other words and phrases associated with AI are now also in the Cambridge Dictionary, including ‘prompt engineering’, the practice of designing requests for AI tools to follow, as well as ‘large language model’ and ‘GenAI’, an abbreviation of generative AI. 

‘The widespread use of the term ‘hallucinate’ to refer to mistakes by systems like ChatGPT provides a fascinating snapshot of how we’re thinking about and anthropomorphising AI,’ said Dr Henry Shevlin, an AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge. ‘Inaccurate or misleading information has long been with us, of course, whether in the form of rumours, propaganda, or “fake news”.

‘Whereas these are normally thought of as human products, ‘hallucinate’ is an evocative verb implying an agent experiencing a disconnect from reality. This linguistic choice reflects a subtle yet profound shift in perception: the AI, not the user, is the one ‘hallucinating’. While this doesn’t suggest a widespread belief in AI sentience, it underscores our readiness to ascribe human-like attributes to AI.

‘As this decade progresses, I expect our psychological vocabulary will be further extended to encompass the strange abilities of the new intelligences we’re creating.’

Other popular words in 2023 from the Cambridge dictionary

Other words that experienced a spike in public interest and an increase in the number of searches on the Cambridge Dictionary during 2023 include: 

Implosion ‘The act of falling towards the inside with force; a situation in which something fails suddenly and completely.’

Ennui ‘A feeling of being bored and mentally tired caused by having nothing interesting or exciting to do.’

Grifter ‘Someone who gets money dishonestly by tricking people.’

GOAT ‘Abbreviation for Greatest Of All Time: used to refer to or describe the person who has performed better than anyone else ever, especially in a sport.’

Shadowban A social media company limiting the audience for someone’s posts, usually without the person who has published them knowing what’s happened.

Vibe check ‘An act of finding out how someone is feeling or how they make you feel, or what the mood in a particular place or situation is.’

Affrilachian ‘An African American who comes from or lives in the region of Appalachia in the eastern United States.’

Range anxiety ‘The fear that an electric vehicle will not have enough battery charge to take you where you want to go to.’

UBI ‘Abbreviation for universal basic income: an amount of money that is given regularly to everyone or to every adult in a society by a government or other organisation and that is the same for everyone.’

AI hallucinations are also known as confabulations. They sometimes appear nonsensical but they can also seem entirely plausible – even though they are factually inaccurate or totally illogical.

AI hallucinations have led to problems in the real world. When Google’s Bard made an error in a promotional video, its parent company Alphabet lost $100 billion in market value.

ChatGPT, which swept the globe after its release in November last year, has also generated a number of problematic hallucinations, including accusing an Australian mayor of bribery and a US law professor of sexual misconduct.

‘The fact that AIs can hallucinate reminds us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these tools,’ said Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary’s Publishing Manager.

‘AIs are fantastic at churning through huge amounts of data to extract specific information and consolidate it. But the more original you ask them to be, the likelier they are to go astray.

‘At their best, large language models can only be as reliable as their training data. Human expertise is arguably more important – and sought after – than ever, to create the authoritative and up-to-date information that LLMs can be trained on.’

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